Slow Ventures cofounder Sam Lessin says his company is investing in cults.
“I think we’re past the moment of mass-market creators, like Beast Industries,” he told Adweek. “What we invest in are cults. The most valuable cults are not the ones that you can talk about on CNBC.”
But you can talk about them in Adweek. Slow Ventures told the outlet that over the past year, it’s backed Gen Z career advice giver Erin McGoff, textile manufacturing expert Will Lasry, and commercial fisherman Kyle Lee, all of whom have strong presences on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn, but don’t view social media stardom as their end goals.
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McGoff got $1.5 million, Lasry got $2.5, and Lee’s total wasn’t disclosed, but Slow Ventures said it was between $1 and $3 million.
The cash came from Slow Ventures’ $64 million fund, announced in February 2025 with the explicit purpose of financially supporting “creators with ambitions to build companies tailor-made for their passionate communities.”
Slow Ventures has also used the fund to back Diary of a CEO creator Steven Bartlett, physiotherapist Tayla Cannon, woodworker Jonathan Katz-Moses, and car channel VINwiki.
To Adweek, Lessin and Slow Ventures Partner Megan Lightcap gave a deeper look at how the deals work, as well as what pushes Slow Ventures to sign with certain creators.
Lightcap explained that Slow Ventures’ investment MO is to put money into a creator’s holding company rather than a specific product. (MrBeast got another mention here: She compared it to investing in Beast Industries vs investing in Feastables.) The firm’s stake is generally below 15 or 20%, she said, and that stake is only in the creator’s owned portion.
So, for example, if the creator’s holding company partners with another firm for a 50-50 venture, Slow Ventures’ stake would only be in the half the creator owns. The outside firm would get its full 50%.
That structure helps encourage other companies to continue investing in Slow Ventures’ creators, since they’ll get their full portion of any signed deal.
Slow Ventures also doesn’t take revenue shares, Lightcap said.
As for why the firm picked these creators (and will continue to pick creators like them), Lessin called McGoff, Lasry, and Lee central “nodes” in their niches that treat gathering digital audiences as “a means to a broader commercial end, rather than the end itself,” Adweek writes.
For example, Lee runs a flash-frozen DTC biz that ships out catches from his fishing enterprise. Having tens of thousands of online followers helps him drive sales.
By investing in businesses like Lee’s, Slow Ventures is doing what creators are always urged to: diversifying its earning potential beyond the creator ecosystem. Mainstay industries like textiles and fishing aren’t going anywhere, and funding expert, entrepreneurial creators expands our space’s footprint beyond social platforms.
Slow Ventures also isn’t going after trendy bubbles like gen AI.
Lessin told Adweek that the AI explosion has made these industries even more important for investment. “The premium on trust has never been higher,” he said. “It is so easy to make a product that having a better product is no longer investable. Trust and community are what is investable.”
The firm plans to dispatch the rest of its $64 million fund over the next two to three years.
